During the past 50 years, computing and communications technologies have rapidly advanced in functionality, capacity, and availability. While computing was once available only to large corporations and governmental organizations that could afford extremely expensive room-sized computer installations, computing resources are now distributed throughout the world and densely interconnected by many different high-bandwidth communications media, including Internet-based communications provided over local and wide-area networks, public telephone systems, wireless communications, and by other communications technologies. Highly available and economical computing resources and dense interconnection through modern communications technologies have spawned new industries and form the basis of new electronic infrastructures, including e-commerce infrastructures, social-networking services, and utility-like cloud-computing services. The economical availability of high-bandwidth computational resources and communications technologies have also created large markets for many different types of application programs that can be distributed through communications media to a variety of different types of computing devices distributed throughout the world, including the social-networking-services market. There remain, however, a variety of constraints and hurdles to developing highly functional, cloud-connected interactive applications for widespread distribution and use in social-networking contexts. The current patent application is directed to a class of highly functional, cloud-connected, interactive applications suited for distribution and use in social-networking contexts.